Overview
By far the best means to get a blooming online business presence is to get an eye-catching eCommerce Website for your brand.
More than less, it is a big decision. And will substantially have a long-term effect on your venture and how well your business plans work out.
Now, coming to where to host your eCommerce website or build one? The options of web hosting or web building eCommerce platforms are numerous. Thus, it takes a good amount of research to select the best one for your Industrial domain as well as the size of your business. In addition, the area of global you want to dominate. One must understand that no matter, which Website building platform they choose, it is fairly difficult to change it shortly. So you need to crucially select the best one out because you will be using this for years.
It is just like choosing the best model of car for your commute. And if possible you can even make do with a cycle or scooter, in case of a website a Brochure, or a Static website.
Factors to Consider
Apart from the popularity and reputable website hosting site, there are other factors for any online store website.
To start with a well-visible inventory with proper active filters for different categories of your products. Followed by the ease of completion of the purchase cycle with the number of Payment options linked with the website. And not last but importantly an order tracking for each user’s account with the latest update of their order delivery status.
Thus, choosing a hosting partner who provides all of these features to build your eCommerce website is vital. To simplify, you must consider these factors before choosing a Web hosting site for eCommerce:
Cost
Talking about starting a business, everything boils down to cost or budget. And nobody has a money tree in their backyard. Thus, choosing a platform based on your budget is far more important than you think.
As well as, you must consider the future updates and maintenance costs for your running eCommerce website.
Certainly, you don’t want to invest in a Platform that might not be fit for your store image or offers features that are available freely or at low-cost plans from other providers.
Storage
Each Web Platform provides space on their server as per the subscription you own. And most of these packages only have a specified amount of space to organize your online store on. And this directly affects how your Inventory will look and how your customer will browser around and fill their cart.
In addition, you need to check the Database management functions offered. The size of your online web portal also states the response time for loading and using your website to shop.
It is best to remember, most of the purchases are made from Mobile, so your website must be adaptive for small screens. And there are far more data than what is showcased on the front-end side of your site.
Visual features
With the rise in the digital race, the time spent on any web page is drastically dropping based on how attractive the page design and usability are.
In other words, your Website must be eye candy for your Customers, so they are happy to spend more and more time on your shop. And potentially even make a purchase when practically they don’t seem to plan for any.
Thus, your website host Platform must have several design templates and themes to choose from. Moreover, they are updated regularly with changing trends in the market. So, you always have the best base to start assembling your eCommerce store with colour schemes and fonts that provided a personal touch to your digital shop.
Integrations
When coming to an online store, there is not just a digital ally of products but also lots of integrated services to complete the buying process.
Likely Product search options ex: by images or voice search, product filters, Cart management services, Payment Gateway, Shipping tools, Delivery tracking, Customer support, and others.
So, you should get a platform that allows linking all these other services based on your business targeted locations.
Ease of use
No matter, how amazing features the Platform provides to make your website if you need to spend a good amount of time to learn using some basic functions because of the complexity of the hosting portal then it’s not a fair deal.
There are tons of options available, where a mere nobody can build a website by drag & drop options of the Web hosting sites at reasonable subscription packages.
Free features
Most of the Web building platforms provide a free model for building a basic website, and these sites may have a domain name that ends with the hosting site name
For instance: yourname.yourwebhostname.com
But this may be the best option to make you a demo version of your website or just go around how the platform works and what features they provide in their premium version.
Furthermore, if you are a startup or an individual entrepreneur you should start with free or low-cost features from your subscription.
SEO tools
Undoubtedly the game changer for your online presence!
Make sure, that your Website builder has working SEO checking tools and helps you to optimize your web pages according to the latest SEO rules.
So your every product description and title reaches the top searches and is listed on the initial pages of the Web search results. Make your customer reach you faster.
Support
Customer support is an important part of any brand, this is where a chance to earn the loyalty of users emerges.
And it’s similar for Web hosting portals too. How quickly they respond to any query that their customer may have and what options they provide to reach them.
Most Website Builders have a chat option available, to simply chat away from any hindering cases with the Website design or development.
Here are the Top Web eCommerce platform
Shopify
The first search result to appear when you look for the best eCommerce platforms is Shopify. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution then Shopify is certainly the one. It provides options for new beginners to large-scale businesses to build their eCommerce websites.
Allowing users, to expand across boundaries of nations to sell with different currencies, and manage a large to a few numbers of products. With tools to customize your products and track and manage to ship.
Shopify has easy-to-use features that enable first-timers to get started. Also, it provides a range of useful applications to link with your website and boost your business to the next stage. Accounting for about 7000 apps and plugins.
Including popular social media apps to sell your products like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, and more.
Also, one of the key services they provide to its user is 24/7 support, which provides you with enough information to resolve any hiccups that you may have.
Concept of Shopify Ecommerce Platform
However, Shopify is a bit tough on the cost size, as it has limited free features. Moreover, it is a Plugin dependent platform, which can also add up the cost and may make your site performance slow, if used without proper management.
Nonetheless, Shopify, outruns Wix, Squarespace, and WooCommerce in features owning up the service charges but doesn’t offer more free options.
WooCommerce
To build an attractive yet functional eCommerce website with adequate ease of use for your customers, there is a huge pool of options available for hosting platforms.
WooCommerce is a WordPress Plugin to set up your WordPress website with an eCommerce theme. It is easy to install on your WordPress site and start easy selling of your products.
If you are already familiar with WordPress websites and handling the back-end part, then WooCommerce is way simpler for you to use. You can manage your products, order, and deliveries from the back-end part just like you manage posts on WordPress.
Furthermore, it provides a range of free to paid features to upscale your eCommerce website. And also, provide you with the integration number of applications to increase your reach.
WooCommerce is an Open source tool that comes with a range of free features to use. However, it doesn’t provide support for its free version but you can buy a WordPress maintenance services subscription that provides WooCommerce support plans.
Woocommerce website concept
Moreover, it’s quite popular so you can easily find free tutorials on the internet to resolve any query you may face.
Coming to the downside, WooCommerce is an eCommerce software offered by WordPress, thus you need to have a WordPress website and know how to use it. Also, if you want a proper eCommerce hosting site then WooCommerce and Shopify are better options.
Squarespace
Squarespace has the sleekest designs and modification tools to give a custom touch. Though it requires a bit of time to get used to working with all the features, the range of high-quality functions makes it worth it.
Your customers will admire your site Design and its Visual features, thanks to Squarespace designing tools and templates. And thus, provide an outstanding User experience.
The Squarespace Design section has a long list of options to choose from and revamp the template you have selected.
Squarespace owns up its name as a Trademark for cool designs. It comes with several pages for an eCommerce website; Product page, Blog, Gallery option on your Homepage, and more. However, in terms of the price range, Wix is a better option, whereas for large product inventory you should consider Shopify.
It also provides some noteworthy features like ‘ Sale features’ which cover everything you need for selling a product. From product variant options, management inventory, Auto emailing, sale options, etc.
Furthermore, it has Squarespace Extensions, an app store with 25 apps to add more features to your website design and functions. In addition, it comes with ‘Offline selling mode’ where you can sell offline with card payments and sync everything with your online inventory. With a premium feature of the Squarespace Commerce app and a Square card reader.
The SEO built-in feature of Squarespace enables your site to be optimized with various SEO checklists and improve its visibility on Google. Also, provide integration options for Social media applications and Stripe & PayPal as payment methods.
Considering the cost parameter, it comes to a reasonably good investment for its basic to premium versions. The customer Support part is reachable 24/7 but only provides a live chat option during EST working hours.
Magento
Magento is an Open source web builder that provides the most freedom in terms of rich content and products. And if you have some experience using this, you can build up your online store from scratch even if you are a small business or an individual entrepreneur.
It provides Magento marketplace extensions to add to your eCommerce website.
However, you need to have good developing knowledge to set up the extension for product integration, checkout points, payment methods, etc because it doesn’t support drag & drop functions.
Furthermore, you can buy the paid version of Magento which is quite pricy, to help you with real-time guides and walkthroughs for designing your website. Also, it is not a great choice for designing an artsy web design but it does provide Magneto Connect option to link with Themeforest for design tools.
Magento eCommerce website concept
Magento comes with its strength for developing an eCommerce website but in terms of cost and design, there are better options available. And if you want to stick with the free version, then you ought to depend on the community for any support you may require.
Wix- ecommerce
Wix beats most of the eCommerce hosting platforms with its ad-based free version. It also provides a huge range of template options of about 500+ to set up your Website design.
Owning its user-friendly ease of use, anyone can set up an eCommerce website in a matter of hours. As it provides a drag and drop web builder and AI features to help you select the best design as per your business need and customize them.
Moreover, the Wix website can be easily customized for mobile screens with its Mobile optimization feature. In addition, to its multilingual feature to set your site for international audiences and built-in SEO checker for content optimization. Wix doesn’t let you miss any opportunity to reach your customer.
The Customer support Wix provides is also to the point and with its selling features, you can control your complete eCommerce cycle. It has Product management to shipping features and can integrate from 50+ payment options including its own Payment Gateway called Wix payment.
Wix can be linked to multiple channels and Social applications. It provides a marketing feature called Wix Ascend, which is an all-in-one marketing tool to help you grow your business.
However, if you are looking to build an eCommerce empire, Shopify is a better choice.
Conclusion
In this blog, 5 of the best eCommerce platforms are outlined ( Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Magento) with some useful factors to consider while choosing the Web hosting Platform (Cost, Storage, Visual features, Ease of use, free features, SEO tools, and Support) are explained.
We at Esurgent, provide all the Web design and development services to assist you to develop an eCommerce website on the platform of your choice from anyone above to any other as per your choice.
